Theater

Trad delivers a kiss and a kick to Irish drama The fiddler’s on the ground floor in Trad , but Tevye would nonetheless identify with the play’s history-bound patriarch — though compared with this venerable coot, Sholem Aleichem’s beleaguered dairyman is a spring chicken.

SpeakEasy’s Adding Machine sings A bleak expressionist fable centered on a murderous bookkeeper symbolically named Zero. Even when you throw in sexual repression, religious zealotry, a trip to Heaven, and enough dissonance to sate Stephen Sondheim, that doesn’t sound like the stuff of song and dance.

Becky Shaw at the Huntington; Entertaining Mr. Sloane at the Publick; Othello at Actors' Shakespeare Project You know upon meeting Becky Shaw that you're in the presence of a smart, snappy writer. But you picture playwright Gina Gionfriddo as someone more akin to Theresa Rebeck than William Makepeace Thackeray.

Stick Fly at the Huntington; Paradise Lost at the ART; boom at New Rep One of the heroines of Stick Fly , a post-doctoral student of etymology, likes to smear honey on the table and then scrutinize the flies that get stuck in it.

Trailer parks, baseball curses, mad scientists, and Darwin There's plenty more than we can fit in, but here's a sampling of the broad range covered on Boston stages this spring, from new works to Shakespeare and Mel Brooks.

Private Fears in Public Places at Zeitgeist, Neighborhood 3 at Apollinaire Private Fears in Public Places — Alan Ayckbourn's London-set tragicomedy from 2004 — is all about how difficult it is to know another person.

Trinity throws a Twelfth Night party Director Brian McEleney returns to Trinity Repertory Company for a raucous Twelfth Night that hums with energy, drollery, and a makeshift score that meshes Shakespearean ditty with such seasonal fripperies as "Auld Lang Syne" and the Mariah Carey hit "All I Want for Christmas Is You."